Data security technology is becoming more important with the growing popularity of Internet services. As companies and individuals grow reliant on remote data storage, there is a growing demand in data security measures to reduce data breaches or data hacks that can cause irreparable financial and personal damages to the data owners. One important aspect of data security measures is data encryption technology.
Particularly, data encryption technology can include data encryption and data decryption. Data encryption can use an encryption key to transform a clear text to a cipher text, whereas data decryption can transform the cipher text to the clear text.
Hardware-based data encryption technology, such as a self-encrypting drive (SED), can encrypt data as it is written to a storage medium and decrypt the data as it is read from the storage medium. A SED, for example, can use encryption keys to encrypt or decrypt the protected data. However, with the increasing popularity of cloud computing, it remains a challenge to manage the numerous encryption keys for a large number of SEDs in data centers.